Off the Wall: A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg

Calvin Tomkins celebrates one of the most fascinating and adventurous art crowds in history and a high point in American art in Off The Wall. Focusing on the career of Robert Rauschenberg, Tomkins chronicles the astonishingly creative period of the 1950s and 1960s, when New York artists moved art off the walls of museums and galleries and into the center of the social scene. This revolution was led by painters Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and carried on by Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, and Andy Warhol, as well as by the dealers Leo Castelli and Betty Parsons, the patron Peggy Guggenheim, and John Cage and Merce Cunningham. Off the Wall is a witty, stylish and exuberant portrait of the art-makers of our time.